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[My-ci] My Research on Creative Industries

Ned Rossiter makes some good points in discussion of why his research is relevant… was for a job talk, but subsequently sent to MyCI – have a look at the whole thing, its not too long…

[My-ci] My Research on Creative Industries:“In studying the relations between labour-power and the creativeindustries my interest has been twofold: first, at a theoretical andpolitical level, I have sought to invent concepts and methodologiesthat address the question of the organisation of labour-power withinnetwork societies and informational economies. Here, my researchrelates to and has been informed by what the political philosopherPaolo Virno calls ‘the thorniest of problems: how to organize aplurality of ‘social individuals’ that, at the moment, seemsfragmented, constitutionally exposed to blackmail – in short,unorganizable?'[3] Out of an interest in new forms of agency in thecreative industries, I have investigated the political concept of“organised networks”, which can be understood as emergentinstitutional forms whose mode of organising sociality is immanent tonetworked forms of communications media.[4]

Secondly, my research has investigated the double-edged sword ofprecarity within post-Fordist economies, of which the creativeindustries belong as a service economy modulated throughinformational relations.[5] The precarity of labour-power within thecreative industries is double-edged in the sense that it enables theattractions of flexibility – the escape from the Fordist time of thefactory and the firm – yet accompanying these relative freedoms isthe dark side of what researchers such as Beck, Lash, Urry and Butlerhave variously called uncertainty, insecurity, risk and complexity.Such fields of inquiry resonate with the concept of organisednetworks, both of which are rarely addressed from within creativeindustries research “